Creating buyer personas to find your customers

As you are trying to grow your ecommerce sales on Big Cartel or even a marketplace like Storenvy you need to review your target market and your approach of marketing to them. So let’s define your buyer personas and confirm your content marketing is speaking to the right people.

Creating a buyer persona is about the who, what, when, where and why of your potential customers. I believe the goal is to help you understand the buying behavior of a customer before they ever show up. Then you can tailor your content efforts towards a few different types of customers. In the end I hope your marketing and messaging will be more purposeful and attract people ready to buy from your shop.

Ask yourself the following questions to get started with personas for your ecommerce site.

Who are your buyers?

Consider age ranges, male or female, and maybe some core beliefs. If you sell a product made of recycled material you might consider selling to someone with the core belief of recycling. But you still might want to develop a persona for someone who doesn’t base buying decisions on that since they still might like a quality product that you offer.

Why are they making a buying decision?

Time to understand the problems, goals or interests the buyer might have in making a purchase. Perhaps your product provides a specific solution to their problem. Maybe your product can offer them a glimpse of a different lifestyle or perhaps it simply makes them feel good/pretty/strong, you get the point.

When do they buy?

Timing is key. Figure out seasonality or a specific timeframe people are buying your products. If you sell seasonal products make sure to understand when someone is buying Valentine’s cards. You need to market these early in December and January or you might miss out once February rolls around.

Where do they buy?

Finding your target customers is obviously important. You have an online store so of course you want them to be online. But perhaps your customers prefer mobile, in store, social networks, trade shows, concerts or other venues when making their purchasing decisions. Big Cartel and Shopify now offer iPhone apps for in person sales and Big Cartel , Storenvy, Shopify and others all offer Facebook stores for your products.

Putting it all together

You should ideally be able to create multiple personas of potential buyers. I recommend jotting these personas down on an index card so you can reference them later.

Now review your store, your blog, social networks, all your content. Is it speaking to the people you just described as your potential and best customers? If not make a plan to start changing one or two things a week. Start sharing posts or updates on topics your buyer personas would be interested in.

Be consistent and methodical for a few weeks with these strategies. Report back. I would love to find out how understanding your buyers helped increase sales on your Big Cartel shop.